27 Nov 2012
When Robby asked me to migrate our app, heybrainstormr.com, over to AppFog, I was surprised. I am a Frontend Developer here at Planet Argon and am not used to doing things that include the words migrating, database or runtimes. He assured me that if I needed help, a developer would be within shouting distance to assist. Confident in the fact that backup was available, I headed into the fog.
14 Aug 2012
In 2009 we asked the community how they hosted their Rails applications. Over 1,200 people chimed in with their answers. Once the data was compiled, we released the results to the community so that everyone could see where we were and where we were going.
In 2012, we set out to find what had changed over the last three years.
This time around 1,306 people took time out of their days to let us know how they were hosting their apps.
As before, we’re releasing the results back to the community along with this handy infographic that we’ve put together.
Let’s take a look at the data.
It looks like Ruby on Rails is still attracting new people, with over 25% of the respondents saying that they’ve joined the community in the last two years.
This year, we asked two new questions. We wanted to know what versions of Ruby and Ruby on Rails people have deployed out there.
The data is interesting. 45% of people reported that they had at least one application out there still running on the venerable Rails 2.3.x version. In addition to that, 85% of people have deployed an application running on Rails 3.2.
On the Ruby side, a similar trend emerges, over 50% of people said that they were using Ruby 1.8.7 (either REE or MRI), but people overwhelming said that they also had applications running on Ruby 1.9.3.
I think that this shows that the community is pragmatic, supporting applications that are older, but unafraid of adopting the latest and greatest when the opportunity presents itself.
There were a few surprises this year.
In 2009, 80% of people said that they were using MySQL and 63% said that they preferred using said database server. This year, PostgreSQL eats up a large chunk of MySQL’s market share. 40% of people said that they were using Postgres in production and 60% of people said that they wanted to use it in production.
Although the majority of developers are keeping track of exceptions there is a significant number of developers that aren’t; nearly 30% of all developers.
Of those developers that are tracking exceptions, the most popular method is by using the Airbrake app (formerly known as Hoptoad). Airbrake zoomed past ExceptionNotifier gobbling up 50% of the vote. ExceptionNotifier used to reign in this space with 53% of the vote in the last survey.
This is the first year that we’ve asked about the use of Continuous Integration and we were surprised to see the number of people that aren’t using one so high. 64% of people said that they aren’t using a CI server.
Of the people that are using a CI server, Jenkins is by far the most popular with nearly 66% of the vote with Travis CI coming in a distant second with 27%.
One more surprise showed up in the results from this year. Apache and Nginx did a bit of role reversal.
In 2009, 69% of people said that they were using Apache, while Nginx took a backseat with just 24% of the vote. In 2012, things are quite different as Nginx is now the leader with 61% of the vote and Apache drops to 35%.
In addition to the surprises this year, there were some predictable trends. In 2009, over 60% of the people chose Git as their source control software, but there were still 36% of people out there using Subversion.
In 2012, people resoundingly chose Git. That number jumped to 94% and Subversion withered away to a mere 4%.
Another unsurprising trend is the battle of the Rails servers.
In 2009, 38% of people were using Mongrel. In 2012, someone let the dogs out but they didn’t come back. Mongrel’s share dropped down to a measly 3%. Most of this market share went over to the relatively new upstart Unicorn, while Passenger picked up a few percentage points to its lead.
It’s definitely been interesting seeing the trends in between the two surveys and I think it’s going to be interesting to see what happens in another few years.
Where do you see trends going in another 3 years?
Yes, we’ve put together an infographic for your consumption!
21 Jul 2012
With the release of 2.0, I decided to give PhoneGap another look and head off to the launch talks. Here is a list of what I found interesting…
16 Jul 2012
A comedic look at unboxing the new Nexus 7 Android tablet.
29 Jun 2012
Recently, Google released their Building Smartphone-Optimized Websites recommendations. Within these pages, Google briefly describes the different techniques for implementing mobile-optimized sites and, of course, how to ensure that the horde of Google robots recognizes the relationship between your desktop and mobile sites, and index them accordingly.
20 Jun 2012
Media queries, the cornerstone of responsive design, have now earned an official W3C recommendation. That means all browsers will be expected to support them from here on out. This brings responsive design from an interesting technique to a working web standard. Go forth and make your site responsive.
30 May 2012
In January 2009 we invited the community to participate in a survey about the state of hosting Ruby on Rails applications. We wanted to get a better understanding of how people are currently managing their deployment and hosting process, and what they’d like to see going forward. Our goal was to use the information provided to help us continue to evolve our hosting-related products and deployment services (this actually helped us decide to accept Bluebox’s acquisition of our hosting business later that year). Additionally, we wanted to provide this information back to the community so that our colleagues in the industry could also use this information in their decision making processes.
Given that it’s been over three years since we ran this survey, we felt that it would be interesting to see just how much the landscape has changed by running another one.
We’ve modified a few of the old questions and added some new ones for good measure. Responses will be collected through the month of June and the results will then be shared with everyone (similar to 2009).
If you have a few minutes to spare, take our survey and help us how Ruby on Rails applications are being deployed in 2012.
30 May 2012
Participate in our 2012 Rails Hosting survey!
24 May 2012
Guy Kawasaki releases What the Plus!, in which he explains what “makes Google+ as special as Macintosh”.
I was a little surprised when I first read about this, as my experience of Google+ so far has been like walking down a deserted street, complete with tumbleweed and whistling wind. In all honesty, I’ve probably not been fair with it and wrote it off quite quickly. However, when somebody as well-respected as Guy Kawasaki makes such a bold comparison it did make me want to go take another look at it.
One of the points he makes is the clean interface, with plenty of white space. Google’s interfaces are not for everybody – often being described as utilitarian, but my feeble brain tends to prefer this style. The most important aspect though is whether or not there is any activity, and several months on (with admittedly small circles) I’m still seeing barely any activity. Going there makes you feel like you chose the wrong party. The few people there are standing at the edge of the room, and its all disturbingly quiet.
My prediction? The next Wave.
11 May 2012
Tizen is a new mobile software platform that is part of the Linux Foundation and runs HTML5 based apps. They held a developer conference down in San Francisco. I flew down to find out more information about this new operating system.
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